He favored them with a curt nod, but did not otherwise notice them till he had brought his dictation to an end. Then turning with a sardonic smile, he said: "Good-morrow, gentlemen. Very pleased to see you, especially you, Mills. You find an unlooked-for change in me since you were here last week--hey? It's all your friend Jimmy Banks's doing. From the hour he changed my physic, now four or five days since, I began to mend. Why he didn't change it before, instead of letting me get down to death's door first, the Lord only knows. But Jimmy always was a wag. Don't shake your pow in that way, sir; you know I'm speaking the truth. What grand weather for the crops we are having just now! I'm told that both my corn and my taties are coming on famously; but I hope to drive round in a day or two and see them for myself."
There was nothing to be done and very little to be said, and the two doctors cut their visit as short as possible.
Said Mills to the other after they had left the room: "What was the change of medicine he spoke of? What fresh treatment have you been subjecting him to?"
"To none at all, I give you my word. I am sending him the same mixture now that I was sending him three weeks ago--the one that you and I agreed upon. No single ingredient has been changed. In saying what he did he was only poking fun at us in his cynical way."
"Possibly at you, Banks, but certainly not at me," rejoined the other in his pompous way. "In any case, he's a very remarkable old man, and although I could not quite follow you in thinking that his vitality was at such a low ebb as you seemed to make out, I certainly did not credit him with the possession of the marvellous recuperative powers to which our eyes have just borne testimony."
"Humph! You seem to be blessed with a very short memory, Mills. Your own words on the occasion of your last visit were, 'I give him three days at the outside,' and that's just a week ago."
"Well, well; we are all liable to err, of course. Still, I'm afraid that I allowed my judgment to be in some measure led astray by your diagnosis. I ought to have subjected him to a more comprehensive examination than seemed to be necessary at the time. For all that, I cannot deny that his case is one of the most remarkable which has come under my notice. In short, I should hardly be going too far if I were to term his recovery, however temporary it may be, little short of miraculous."
Dr. Banks grunted. He was too indignant to reply in words. Only to himself he said, "I always set you down in my own mind as a humbug, and now I'm more convinced of it than ever."
As the reader will have rightly surmised, the marvellous change in Squire Cortelyon was wholly and solely due to the drug administered to him by Cornelius Dinkel. Already, as we have seen, he was able to sit up--although only for a short hour at first--and transact business; and each day brought its own small addition of strength and vital power. Soon he was able to go out on fine days for a drive, and a little later he even got so far as, with the help of Andry Luce's arm, to take short strolls about the grounds.
But this eminently satisfactory state of things could only be maintained on one condition: it was absolutely essential that a certain regulated dose of the wonderful drug should be administered to the patient daily. For the purpose of carrying out this arrangement Dinkel made a point of coming to the Hall every evening after dark, bringing the day's dose with him in a phial. He simply waited long enough to see the Squire swallow it, and then went his way.